Redmond, Washington — Microsoft Corp.’s recently unleashed the latest update to its high-spirited search engine, Bing, boosting the experience related to entertainment for users by spotlighting music, films, games and television shows.
The US software giant earlier this week added an array of new entertainment features to make it easier for Bing users to explore their favorite musics, games, movies and TV programs online in-depth.
“In this update of Bing one of the biggest investments we are making is in the area of entertainment,” Bing senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post.
One facet of the evolution involves making Bing a centralized location for finding lyrics online. On the music front, Bing now delivers playable search results: users can play a full-length version of each song once, and 30-second samples after that.
Bing search for “Roger Waters” presents a brief history, playable song samples with lyrics for a single song, a catalog of albums, and links to spread the results via various social networks. Bing software was redesigned to improve results to entertainment-related searches and a page devoted to the content was launched at www.bing.com/entertainment.
“We did not just stop at lyrics. In addition to the full Bing answers experience where you can get photos, videos, and even tour dates for your favorite acts, we partnered with our friends at Zune, and are now able to offer full-length streaming for more than 5 million songs. You get a single play of every song in this 5 million song catalog, and after that 30 second previews. So you can really get into the music you love. When it is time to buy, we will empower you with the ability to purchase and download songs from Zune, iTunes and Amazon.com MP3,” revealed Mehdi, Senior Vice President, Bing.
“Bing is taking an initiative today to help make recreation on the Web simple and fun, so you spend less time searching for entertainment and more time doing the stuff you love.” Bing is providing local TV times, movie listings and access to song lyrics, Mehdi said in a statement. The company invited press to an event in West Hollywood, California, to announce the updates.
“With Bing, we have altogether unleashed a very widespread collection of full length TV serials and visually organized them so it is effortless to find what you are looking for and start watching. With thousands of episodes from over 1500 shows including lots of HD content, watching your favorite shows online is easier than ever before,” Mehdi added.
Also according to Microsoft, the company has linked into its games divisions, which develops titles for the company’s Xbox 360 videogame consoles, to organize for people to be able to play scores of popular online games on Bing pages, in addition to offering extensive information on more than 35,000 games that will be available to users through Bing. This includes not only online shops and reviews, but also cheats and walkthroughs, as well as destinations for casual games. No less than 100 of the most popular games will be available right from Bing from Microsoft Games.
The feature is similar to what Google introduced in October, and may help Microsoft gain ground over search engine Google Inc.’s dominance. A study of Bing users indicated that 76 percent want one online destination for entertainment options to eliminate clutter, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said. Bing organizes search results into TV shows, music, video games and movies.
“As the content on the Web has exploded, it has become difficult to navigate and find what you are looking for,” Mehdi said. “So all of this cool stuff is going live right now, with the exception of the TV listings, which will be along in a couple of weeks, and the music playback will ramp up over the next few days.”
“We envision a great opportunity to help customers make important entertainment decisions.,” Mehdi added.